


something like serenity

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harrow Nova | Harrowhark is Not the Reverend Daughter, Blood, F/F, Face-Sitting, Knifeplay, Masochism, Scarification, Vaginal Fingering, ghost wards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:55:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28860645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: Gideon said: “I had a talk with the Fifth —” (Harrow rolled her eyes at this.) “— and Lady Pent agrees that there’s something dodgy about this place, so I really don’t want either of us to be running around without proper wards.”“Get to the point.”Gideon grimaced. “Ghost wards have to break the skin.”For the TLT Kink Meme prompt: Gideon/Harrow: knifeplay
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 16
Kudos: 90
Collections: TLT Kink Meme





	something like serenity

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a TLT kink meme prompt - I flipped the dynamic around, sorry!

“Harrow,” the Reverend Daughter said, “I wish I didn’t have to ask this of you, but I’m going to need you to trust me.”

Harrow also wished she hadn't asked this of her, because every bone in her body rebelled at the thought. Harrow Nova did not trust; that the Reverend Daughter would even suggest the possibility made her shiver.

Unaffected by her cavalier’s discomfort, Gideon said: “I had a talk with the Fifth —” (Harrow rolled her eyes at this.) “— and Lady Pent agrees that there’s something dodgy about this place, so I really don’t want either of us to be running around without proper wards.”

“Get to the point.”

Gideon grimaced. “Ghost wards have to break the skin.”

Harrow stilled.

“I’m sorry, Harrow, I wish there was another way, but I can’t take the risk. There’s something really, really wrong here. I won’t let you get hurt.”

There was more of that; Harrow never quite remembered the details afterwards. What she did remember was this: stripping off her robe, shirt, and bandeau and meticulously folding them to set on the dresser, defiant in her nakedness. The Reverend Daughter laying out threadbare towels on the bathroom floor. The hard, slick sound of a blade being sharpened, and the bitter smell of antibac. Lying on her front with a pillow awkwardly shoved under her shoulders, breathing in a smell she wished wasn’t so familiar.

Bracing herself.

“I got some ice from the kitchens,” Gideon said somewhere behind her.

She had not commented on the scars that were already there, criss-crossing Harrow’s back and shoulders in angry welts. They did not hurt, much, anymore.

Harrow hissed through clenched teeth when the ice touched her skin, so cold it burned. Gideon immediately removed it. “I’m sorry,” she said. She sounded like she actually was, which filled Harrow with rage. “I figured it would help.”

Dropping her head, Harrow submitted to this. It was almost insulting, to be treated like this; with care, as though she could be hurt. She was long past pain. She had only flinched because she had not been expecting it, but now that she knew it was coming, the sensation of icy numbness spreading across her back was almost soothing. The Reverend Daughter could be thorough when she wanted to be and covered every inch of Harrow’s skin, not putting a lot of pressure into it so it almost felt like there _was_ a ghost touching her, spreading its freezing fingers possessively over her scapulae and lovingly counting the spinous processes from the Atlas all the way down to her lumbar vertebrae.

“I’m going to disinfect your back again.”

The disinfectant smelled sharply of alcohol. It made Harrow’s eyes water. The Reverend Daughter poured some onto a clean rag and cleaned both her canvas and her paintbrush, said, “I am so sorry,” and set to work.

Harrow did not cry out. The first touch of blade to skin was searing, exquisite agony, and she ground her teeth together and buried her face in the pillow and swallowed the scream building in the back of her throat.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Gideon said again, and again, and again, as she carved the runes and diagrams and sigils into the raw, bleeding flesh of her cavalier, until it became something like a prayer.

It was almost absolution.

After half a myriad, something changed; like a barrel overflowing, there was nowhere else the pain could go, and so it simply changed course and turned into something else entirely. There was less hesitation in Gideon’s hand now, each cut of the knife precisely and surely executed so that there was something like a rhythm to it that Harrow could anticipate and lean into. She stopped bracing herself and began to embrace the sensation instead — the sharp sting, burning ache, the heat of Harrow’s own blood and body warming the blade, the minutely different resistance of scar tissue over pristine skin. It was like music, like the clacking of prayer beads in chapel, like the old familiar cadence of the lash on her back. Harrow screwed her eyes shut and tried not to think about how _good_ it felt, how the ebb and flow of anticipation and pain and relief transform the entire scene into something almost like meditation. Like serenity. Like pleasure.

It was over too soon.

She hated herself for it, but she could not stop the tears. She did choke back the sob, ruthlessly biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper and iron. Her fingernails dug into the cold, hard tile until they broke and bled.

“Almost done,” the Reverend Daughter said, sounding as if she, too, was drowning. She had ground ten metacarpals to dust in a shallow bowl and wiped her hands on a damp towel. “Not much longer, I promise.”

The bone dust barely stung. Harrow thought she should be in agony, but her back only throbbed in time with the heartbeat drumming in her ears, distantly, as though perceived through several layers of thick fabric. She wondered, from that same distance, if this was shock, or blood loss, or maybe death; she might have died peacefully, right then. But a moment later Gideon pressed her hand flat into the middle of the constellation of fresh wounds and flooded the room with electric energy and the acrid smell of burnt lemons and when she stepped away again, all was still.

The distant, burning ache had disappeared, leaving behind only that tentative tenderness of newly-healed skin and an entirely different kind of ache and heat. Harrow lay face down on the cold, hard tiles, unwanted tears drying on her cheeks and rivulets of blood coagulating down her sides. The Reverend Daughter was washing her hands.

She almost jumped to her feet when the wet rag touched her. “Careful,” Gideon said, resting her hand on the back of her cavalier’s neck to hold her still. “Don’t tear them open again.” She cleaned the blood away with hesitant, reluctant care, gingerly dabbing over the fresh scars and the sensitive spots just below Harrow’s ribcage which sent shivers down her spine. Gideon went to rinse the rag twice, returning her free hand to Harrow’s neck each time, insult to insult to injury.

“Thank you,” she said at some point. Harrow would not have known how much time had passed. “For letting me do that. I could not have lived with myself, if I’d let you get hurt.”

Harrow said nothing.

“You can get up now, I think. Slowly. Here, let me —” The Reverend Daughter took her cavalier by the shoulders and helped her turn and sit up. The tiles were still cold and hard and she was sensitive all over, her skin tingling as if she’d stuck her hand in an electrical outlet.

They stared at each other. Harrow knew that what was left of her paint must have run and Gideon’s was tinged pink with blood sweat. Abruptly, she remembered she was half-naked, and did nothing about it.

“Reverend Daughter.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“It’s your title.”

“It should have been yours.”

Possessed by some ungodly madness, Harrow kissed her. It was messy and stupid and sacrilege, not to mention disgustingly gauche, but the cavalier primary of the House of the Ninth kissed her necromancer, and her necromancer kissed her back.

“ _Fuck,_ Harrow,” Gideon groaned, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together. “We can’t do this.”

Harrow swallowed. Her hands had tangled themselves in the ceremonial robes without her knowledge or consent and she could not find the resolve to remove them. “Why not?”

“You’re my cavalier.”

Ignoring this, Harrow dropped her head and kissed her again.

“It’s not right.” She parted her lips and sighed when Harrow tentatively ran the tip of her tongue along hers. “I just sliced you open like a piece of meat. You’re not thinking straight.”

“I’m perfectly lucid.” The taste of paint was familiar and safe and a little illicit, so Harrow briefly abandoned Gideon’s mouth to lick a path through the white line of the mandible down to where her jaw met the sensitive skin of her throat.

It was Gideon’s turn to shiver; she tipped her head back to allow easier access. The vibrations of her voice hummed underneath Harrow’s lips as she spoke: “I’ve taken so much from you already. The Ninth — fuck, Harrow — the Ninth House trod you underfoot, they tried to squash you like a beetle just because you weren’t what they wanted —”

This was not a line of conversation Harrow wanted to pursue. She knew all of this already, had known it since she was barely more than a toddler, and the knowledge had served her well all those years as fuel to burn in the freezing rock of her Drearburh cell. It had no place here on the First.

“I can’t ask this of you,” the Reverend Daughter said, and moaned when Harrow scraped her teeth over her trachea.

“If you hadn’t noticed,” Harrow ground out, exasperated, “you are not the one asking.”

That shut her up, at least. Gideon’s hands fluttered helplessly for a moment as she tried to take hold of Harrow, realised her cavalier was still bare-chested, and visibly short-circuited. Harrow rolled her eyes, impatient, grabbed one of her wrists, and pressed Gideon’s hand to her breast, trying and failing to swallow the noise that escaped her. Gideon palmed at her clumsily for a moment, clearly floundering, then adjusted and reached out with her other hand to cup both of Harrow’s breasts, dragging the pads of her thumbs across her nipples. Harrow moaned; Gideon grinned.

As something like revenge, Harrow made short work of the Reverend Daughter’s formal vestments, tossing them aside. She permitted herself half a second to admire the body in front of her, taut and well-sculpted especially for a necromancer, before she pushed, and Gideon went, yelping at the cold tiles on bare skin. Towering over her, Harrow hesitated for the first time.

“We don’t need to do this,” Gideon said, her gold eyes shining up at her.

Which had the exact opposite effect. Harrow had no experience in carnal matters; the one time she had, completely by accident, seen a page from one of those nasty magazines, she had felt slightly queasy and immediately dropped it back where she had found it. But some things did not need explanation. Kneeling at Gideon’s side, she bent down to kiss her again, and dipped her fingers into the patch of ginger curls between her legs. Gideon moaned and Harrow swallowed the noise, taking it into herself to examine later: this was her doing, the disappointing shame of the Ninth, taking apart the Reverend Daughter on the bathroom floor using only her hands.

She had never felt more powerful.

Gideon came with her back arcing off the tiles and a crescendo of “ _fuck_ ” that echoed from the walls. She slumped back down, breathing hard, Harrow’s fingers still inside her, her body covered in a fine sheen of sweat. “Harrow.”

“Yes?”

“Come here.”

And that was a different kind of power, to be on her knees with her legs spread wide, grinding down against Gideon’s tongue with her big hands bracketing her waist. Whatever adrenaline spike Harrow’s body had wrung out of its lean resources had not run out yet and she knew it was only a matter of time until she collapsed, depleted and exhausted, but not yet; she rode the high as far as it would take her, rocking her hips and digging her nails into Gideon’s scalp, until the wave built and crested and crashed over her, sending sparks along every nerve in her body. She scrambled away, oversensitive, ignoring her screaming muscles and the noise of protest that Gideon made when she broke contact.

The water from the tap was cold as ice. Harrow splashed three handfuls on her face, finally washing away the last remnants of her paint, and stared at herself in the mirror. If she turned and twisted her neck, she could just about see the top of the ghost wards the Reverend Daughter had scarified into her back. It didn’t look new; the skin was barely even red, the fresh scars blending in with the network of old ones that had been her constant reminders of her sins.

She jumped when Gideon appeared in the reflection. She had put her robe on over her bare skin and her hair stuck up in all sorts of directions; her chin was still glistening. She said, “Now what?”

Harrow grabbed her shirt and pulled it over her head. There was barely even a twinge — the Reverend Daughter might be a lazy, blasphemous animaphiliac, but she was a powerful necromancer. “Now,” she said, yanking her sleeves down, “we get to work.”


End file.
